Zana Fraillon
Zana Fraillon was born in Melbourne, but spent her early childhood in San Francisco.
Zana has written two picture books for young children, a series for middle readers, and a novel for older readers based on research and accounts of survivors of the Forgotten Generation. She spent a year in China teaching English and now lives in Melbourne with her three sons, husband and two dogs.
When Zana isn't reading or writing, she likes to explore the museums and hidden passageways scattered across Melbourne. They provide the same excitement as that moment before opening a new book - preparing to step into the unknown where a whole world of possibilities awaits.
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Peter Lourie
Peter is an award-winning author, professor, and explorer. He has written over two dozen nonfiction books for children and adults spanning topics from adventure and the environment to polar bears and lost treasure.
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His forthcoming book, Locked in Ice: Nansen's Daring Quest for the North Pole is a spellbinding biography of Fridtjof Nansen, the pioneer of polar exploration, with a spotlight on his harrowing three-year journey to the top of the world.
A true adventurer, Lourie has traveled all over the world to research his subjects, from the cloud forest in Ecuador in search of Inca treasure, to Lake Turkana in northwestern Kenya on the Ethiopian border, to Terra del Fuego and the jungles of Rondonia, Brazil. -
Maryam Master
Maryam Master is a writer with more than 20 years' experience creating work for stage and screen.
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In 2019 she wrote the stage adaptation of David Walliams' best-selling book The Midnight Gang. The show enjoyed a sellout season at the Sydney Opera House and will begin an extensive national tour in 2021. The previous year she wrote an acclaimed adaptation of Walliams' Billionaire Boy, which also toured nationally.
In 2017 Maryam collaborated with Australian Children's Laureate Leigh Hobbs on Horrible Harriet: Live on Stage. In 2016, her new version of Mr Stink toured nationally and to the UAE, and was nominated for a Sydney Theatre Award.
Maryam started her career in television, writing over 80 episodes of Home and Away (Seven Network). Since th -
Souad Mekhennet
Souad Mekhennet is a German journalist of Arab descent. Focusing on Islamic extremism, she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She is the author of several books. Mekhennet speaks Arabic, German, French and English.
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Elizabeth Laird
Laird was born in New Zealand in 1943, the fourth of five children. Her father was a ship's surgeon; both he and Laird's mother were Scottish. In 1945, Laird and her family returned to Britain and she grew up in South London, where she was educated at Croydon High School.
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When she was eighteen, Laird started teaching at a school in Malaysia. She decided to continue her adventurous life, even though she was bitten by a poisonous snake and went down with typhoid.
After attending the university in Bristol, Laird began teaching English in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She and a friend would hire mules and go into remote areas in the holidays.
After a while at Edinburgh University, Laird worked in India for a summer. During travel, she met her future hu -
Craig Silvey
Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia.
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His critically acclaimed debut novel, Rhubarb, was published in 2004. His bestselling second novel, Jasper Jones, was released in 2009 and is considered a modern Australian classic. Published in over a dozen territories, Jasper Jones has won plaudits in three continents, including an International Dublin Literary Award shortlisting, a Michael J. Printz Award Honor, and a Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisting. Jasper Jones was the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for 2010.
His third novel, Honeybee, published in 2020, was an award-winning bestseller. Honeybee was the 2020 Dymocks Book Of The Year, won the Indie Book Award for Best Fiction, and wa -
Bren MacDibble
Bren lives in Kalbarri on the amazing Coral Coast of Western Australia.
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Her first children's novel: How to Bee (2017) won multiple awards, The Dog Runner (2019) and Across the Risen Sea (2020) also won and were shortlisted in multiple awards. The Raven's Song (2022) written with the amazing award-winning Zana Fraillon, has recently been launched.
All her novels are packed full of wild adventures and feature children surviving environmentally changed futures. They are stories that don't mask the realities of the world children see all around them, but do offer hope, safe fictional exploration of climate issues and examples of resilience.
Bren grew up on the land in NZ, and hopes that while children enjoy these wild adventures with colourful cha -
Matt Goodfellow
Matt Goodfellow was a primary school teacher for more than ten years before becoming a full-time poet and author. Shu Lin’s Grandpa is his first book with Candlewick Press. He lives with his wife and children in Manchester, England.
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Jenny McLachlan
I have always loved reading and I studied English at university just so that I could read a bit more. Next I found my way into secondary teaching and discovered that I loved it too: I got to read more books, show off and hang out with very funny teenagers. What a great job!
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Teaching English also encouraged me to write. Soon I had planned and started lots of different stories, but they were all abandoned and shoved to the back of a drawer. Then, one day, the plot for Flirty Dancing came together; Bea’s story was so alive it was like a film running in my head and I knew it was a story I would finish.
Over the next few years, various exciting events distracted me from Flirty Dancing: I got married, travelled the world, was chased by an angry ele -
Pamela S. Turner
Pamela S. Turner has an abiding fascination with science, animals, evolution, and a special interest in Japanese history. She is the author of award-winning books for young readers, including HOW TO BUILD A HUMAN: IN SEVEN EVOLUTIONARY STEPS, an ALA Notable Book, SAMURAI RISING, a YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award finalist, as well as CROW SMARTS and THE FROG SCIENTIST, both winners of the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books. Her newest book, COMET CHASER, is the true Cinderella story of Caroline Herschel, the first professional woman astronomer.
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When not writing, she practices kendo (Japanese sword fighting) and volunteers as a wildlife rehabilitator specializing in crows and ravens.
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Zanni Louise
Zanni Louise has been writing stories since she was little, growing up in country NSW. She’s written over forty internationally published books for kids including picture books, chapter books and books for 10-12 year-olds. Her first teen fiction under her alias, Zanni L. Arnot, A Guide to Falling off the Map (Scholastic US; Hachette AU) is out later this year.
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Her picture books including the bestselling Human-Kind series have been recognised by prominent awards, including Children’s Book Council of Australia, Speech Pathology Awards, Educational Publishing Awards, White Raven’s International Catalogue of Children’s Books, Panda Awards and the Australian Book Design Awards.
Her junior-fiction and middle-grade books have been selected for K.O. -
Melanie Cheng
I am a writer, mum and general practitioner from Melbourne, Australia. I have been published in print and online. My writing has appeared in The Age, Meanjin, Overland, Griffith REVIEW, Sleepers Almanac, The Bridport Prize Anthology, Lascaux Review, Visible Ink, Peril, The Victorian Writer and Seizure. My short story collection, Australia Day, won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Unpublished Manuscript and went on to win the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. My latest book is the novel, Room for a Stranger. If Saul Bellow is right and “a writer is a reader moved to emulation” then I am moved by authors like Richard Yates, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami and Christos Tsiolkas.
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Pip Harry
Pip Harry is an Australian children’s author and journalist. Her middle grade novel, The Little Wave, won the CBCA 2020 Book of the Year Award and the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards – Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature.
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Her young adult novels include I’ll Tell You Mine, Head of the River, and Because of You, shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, Victorian Premier's Literary Award and Queensland Literary Awards.
Are You There, Buddha? is a 2022 CBCA Notable book and was nominated for the Ethel Turner prize.
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Ross Montgomery
Ross Montgomery has worked as a pig farmer, a postman and a primary school teacher, so writing books was the next logical step. He spent his childhood reading everything he could get his hands on, from Jacqueline Wilson to Beano annuals, and it taught him pretty much everything that's worth knowing. If you looked through his pockets you'd find empty crisp packets, lists of things to do, and a bottle of that stuff you put on your nails to stop you biting them. He lives in London with his girlfriend, a cat called Fun Bobby, and a cactus on every available surface.
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Thomas Meehan
Thomas Edward Meehan (Thomas Meehan) was an American writer.
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[Thomas^Meehan]
Librarian note: There is another author with this name in this data base. For the British-born botanist go to Thomas Meehan. -
Katrina Nannestad
Katrina Nannestad is an award-winning Australian author. Her books include The Girl Who Brought Mischief, the Girl, the Dog and the Writer series, the Olive of Groves series, the Red Dirt Diaries series, the Lottie Perkins series and Bungaloo Creek.
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Katrina grew up in country New South Wales in a neighborhood stuffed full of happy children. Her adult years have been spent teaching, raising boys, perfecting her recipe for chocolate-chip bickies and pursuing her love of stories. She now lives near Bendigo with her family and an exuberant black whippet called Olive. -
Kate Gordon
Kate Gordon grew up in a small town by the sea in Tasmania. She is the author of numerous award-winning picture-books and novels for younger readers, including Aster’s Good, Right Things, published by Yellow Brick Books in November, 2020, which won the CBCA Book of the Year for younger readers in 2021, and was shortlisted in the Tasmanian Literary Awards in 2022. The companion novels, Xavier in the Meantime and Indigo in the Storm were published in 2021 and 2023. Whalesong was published by Yellow Brick Books in 2022, following Kate’s residency at the Maritime Museum of Tasmania. Kate continues to write novels and picture books from a cottage overlooking the river and the mountain on the Eastern Shore of Hobart. She has two daughters, an eld
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Kevin Brooks
Kevin Brooks was born in 1959 and grew up in Exeter, Devon, England. He studied Psychology and Philosophy at Birmingham, Aston University in 1980 and Cultural Studies in London in 1983. Kevin Brooks has been in a variety of jobs including: musician, gasoline station attendant, crematorium handyman, civil service clerk, hot dog vendor at the London Zoo, post office clerk, and railway ticket office clerk.
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Kevin Brooks's writing career started with the publication of Martyn Pig in 2002 through The Chicken House which won the Branford Boase Award 2003 and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. He also wrote Lucas (2002) which was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and Booktrust Teenage Prize in 2003 also winning the North Eas -
Keltie Thomas
Keltie Thomas, a former editor of Owl magazine, is the author of several non-fiction books for children. She has been nominated for the Silver Birch Award by the Ontario Library Association five times. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
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Lina al-Hathloul
Lina al-Hathloul is the youngest sister of Loujain al-Hathloul, who was imprisoned by the Saudi government for her advocacy of Saudi women's rights. On behalf of Loujain, Lina appears frequently in the media and at international events, and she has spoken to representatives of the US government and the United Nations. A lawyer by training, Lina is based in Brussels, Belgium.
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Michaela DePrince
Michaela Mabinty DePrince was a Sierra Leonean-American ballet dancer who danced with the Boston Ballet.
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DePrince rose to fame after starring in the documentary First Position in 2011, which followed her and other young ballet dancers as they prepared to compete at the Youth America Grand Prix. In 2013, DePrince danced with the Dance Theatre of Harlem as the youngest dancer in the history of the company, and, in the same year, was a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet.
With her adoptive mother, Elaine DePrince, she authored the book Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina (2014). From 2016 to 2024, she was a goodwill ambassador with the Amsterdam-based organization War Child. -
Tristan Bancks
Tristan Bancks tells stories for the page and screen. His books for kids and teens include Two Wolves, The Fall, Detention, the Tom Weekly series, and Nit Boy. Ginger Meggs, Tristan’s 100th anniversary book of short stories, is based on characters created by his great-great uncle, Jimmy Bancks, in 1921. His books have won and been shortlisted for many awards, including a Children’s Book Council of Australia Honour Book, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, ABIA, YABBA, KOALA, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and Queensland Literary Awards. His latest release is Cop & Robber, a nailbiting crime story for age 10+.
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Tristan is a writer-ambassador for literacy non-profit Room to Read. He is currently working with producers to develop a number of hi -
Stuart Wilson
Stuart Wilson lives in Naarm/Melbourne with his wife and son. He is the author of The 113th Assistant Librarian and the Prometheus High books. Quite the oxymoron, he can frequently be found lost in a book.
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Chelsea Ichaso
Chelsea Ichaso writes twisty thrillers for young adults and is also the author of the adult thriller, So I Lied. Her novel, The Summer She Went Missing, earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, a spot on Barnes & Noble’s Best of 2024 list, and was a 2025 TAYSHAS reading list selection. Her latest release, We Were Warned, is a Junior Library Guild Selection and has been featured on Marie Claire’s list of the 18 Most Anticipated Mystery Thrillers of 2025 as well as Goodreads Guide to 2025’s Biggest Mysteries & Thrillers. Chelsea currently resides in Southern California with her husband and children. When she’s not writing, she can be found cheering from the sidelines at her kids' soccer games or attempting to strum a tune on the guita
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Karen Foxlee
Karen Foxlee is an Australian author who lives and writes in Queensland. Her young adult novels The Anatomy of Wings (UQP/Knopf/Atlantic) and The Midnight Dress (Knopf/UQP/Hot Key Books) have been published internationally to much acclaim. The Anatomy of Wings won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book 2008 (South Asia/Pacific), the Dobbie Award 2008, and a Parent’s Choice Gold Award in the U.S. The Midnight Dress was selected as an ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults title in 2014. Foxlee’s first middle grade novel Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy (Knopf / Hot Key Books) was published in January 2014 and to date has received several starred reviews.
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Karen Foxlee was born in Mount Isa, Queensland in 1971. She has worked most of her adult -
Bren MacDibble
Bren lives in Kalbarri on the amazing Coral Coast of Western Australia.
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Her first children's novel: How to Bee (2017) won multiple awards, The Dog Runner (2019) and Across the Risen Sea (2020) also won and were shortlisted in multiple awards. The Raven's Song (2022) written with the amazing award-winning Zana Fraillon, has recently been launched.
All her novels are packed full of wild adventures and feature children surviving environmentally changed futures. They are stories that don't mask the realities of the world children see all around them, but do offer hope, safe fictional exploration of climate issues and examples of resilience.
Bren grew up on the land in NZ, and hopes that while children enjoy these wild adventures with colourful cha -
Deborah Abela
Deb knew she wanted to be a writer when she was 7 years old. Her first story was about a man made out of cheese. It wasn’t very good. She’s had much more practice writing since then and strangely enough her first writing job was for a kids’ show on channel Ten called “Cheez TV”. After 7 years of writing scripts about everything from llamas to bungy jumping and how to go to the toilet in outer space, Deb wrote her first novel - Max Remy Superspy Part 1: In Search of the Time and Space Machine.
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It’s about a feisty girl called Max and her best friend Linden who travel the world as secret agents fighting bad guys. It’s an action packed series based on loads of adventures Deb had, just after she left school. She’s slept beside alligators, been h -
Craig Silvey
Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia.
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His critically acclaimed debut novel, Rhubarb, was published in 2004. His bestselling second novel, Jasper Jones, was released in 2009 and is considered a modern Australian classic. Published in over a dozen territories, Jasper Jones has won plaudits in three continents, including an International Dublin Literary Award shortlisting, a Michael J. Printz Award Honor, and a Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisting. Jasper Jones was the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for 2010.
His third novel, Honeybee, published in 2020, was an award-winning bestseller. Honeybee was the 2020 Dymocks Book Of The Year, won the Indie Book Award for Best Fiction, and wa -
John Grogan
John Grogan has spent more than 25 years as a newspaper journalist. Previously he worked as a reporter, bureau chief, and columnist at newspaper in Michigan and Florida. He is also the former editor on chief of Rodale's Organic Gardening magazine. His work has won numerous awards, including the National Press Club's Consumer Journalism Award. His first book, Marley & Me, is a number one international bestseller that was as a major motion picture on 2008. His second book is The Longest Trip Home. John lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Jenny, and their three children.
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Emily Rodda
Emily Rodda (real name Jennifer Rowe) was born in Sydney, Australia and graduated from the University of Sydney in 1973 with an MA (Hons) in English Literature. Moving into a publishing career, first as a book editor, and finally as a publisher at Angus & Robertson, Rodda's first book was published in 1984.
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Pip Harry
Pip Harry is an Australian children’s author and journalist. Her middle grade novel, The Little Wave, won the CBCA 2020 Book of the Year Award and the Speech Pathology Australia Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards – Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature.
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Her young adult novels include I’ll Tell You Mine, Head of the River, and Because of You, shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, Victorian Premier's Literary Award and Queensland Literary Awards.
Are You There, Buddha? is a 2022 CBCA Notable book and was nominated for the Ethel Turner prize.
Pip’s latest middle grade novel, August & Jones is out now. -
Eliot Schrefer
ELIOT SCHREFER is a New York Times-bestselling author, and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. In naming him an Editor’s Choice, the New York Times has called his work “dazzling… big-hearted.” He is also the author of two novels for adults and four other novels for children and young adults. His books have been named to the NPR “best of the year” list, the ALA best fiction list for young adults, and the Chicago Public Library’s “Best of the Best.” His work has also been selected to the Amelia Bloomer List, recognizing best feminist books for young readers, and he has been a finalist for the Walden Award and won the Green Earth Book Award and Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. He lives in New York City, where he reviews bo
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Deborah Abela
Deb knew she wanted to be a writer when she was 7 years old. Her first story was about a man made out of cheese. It wasn’t very good. She’s had much more practice writing since then and strangely enough her first writing job was for a kids’ show on channel Ten called “Cheez TV”. After 7 years of writing scripts about everything from llamas to bungy jumping and how to go to the toilet in outer space, Deb wrote her first novel - Max Remy Superspy Part 1: In Search of the Time and Space Machine.
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It’s about a feisty girl called Max and her best friend Linden who travel the world as secret agents fighting bad guys. It’s an action packed series based on loads of adventures Deb had, just after she left school. She’s slept beside alligators, been h -
Emily Gale
Emily Gale has worked in the children’s & YA book industry for over twenty years. In London she worked as an editor for Penguin and Egmont, and later as a freelance manuscript consultant and pre-school book writer. In Melbourne she worked with the late literary agent Sheila Drummond, finding new children’s and YA authors; she has reviewed for Bookseller and Publisher, spent several happy years at independent bookshop Readings as a children’s buyer, during which time she was instrumental in establishing the Readings Children’s Book Prize, and worked in two school libraries. Emily’s writing includes novels for teenagers like Girl, Aloud, Steal My Sunshine, and I Am Out With Lanterns, as well as books for 10+ including The Other Side of Summer
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Debby Dahl Edwardson
My name is Debby and I am a writer. I write stories for young people.
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If you haven't seen me, it's because I live far far away and do, indeed, write from the top of the world: Barrow, Alaska, to be exact, the northernmost community on the North American Continent.
I've lived here pretty much all of my adult life—thirty years (don’t do the math!) and this place and its people have shaped who I am as a writer. My husband is Inupiaq (Eskimo) and most of the stories I write are set within this cultural context. It is not the culture I was born into but it is the one I belong to, the one that has become home to me as a human being and as an artist.
As we all do, I write what I know, and through knowing it in my own way, make it my own, something -
Kate Gordon
Kate Gordon grew up in a small town by the sea in Tasmania. She is the author of numerous award-winning picture-books and novels for younger readers, including Aster’s Good, Right Things, published by Yellow Brick Books in November, 2020, which won the CBCA Book of the Year for younger readers in 2021, and was shortlisted in the Tasmanian Literary Awards in 2022. The companion novels, Xavier in the Meantime and Indigo in the Storm were published in 2021 and 2023. Whalesong was published by Yellow Brick Books in 2022, following Kate’s residency at the Maritime Museum of Tasmania. Kate continues to write novels and picture books from a cottage overlooking the river and the mountain on the Eastern Shore of Hobart. She has two daughters, an eld
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Susan Meredith
Susan Meredith grew up in Yorkshire, and when she wasn't playing out or dancing, she was busy reading or making little books of her own, mainly about ballet. She's now written more than 20 real books for Usborne, on subjects ranging from saving the planet to playing football, from world religions to the human body. Her book Growing Up won the Times Educational Supplement's senior information book of the year award but her own personal favourite has to be Hamsters.
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Bob Graham
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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Leanne Hall
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Leanne Hall is an author of young adult and children’s fiction. Her debut novel, This Is Shyness, won the Text Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Writing, and was followed by a sequel, Queen of the Night. Her novel for younger readers, Iris and the Tiger, won the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature at the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Leanne works as a children’s and YA specialist at an independent bookshop. -
James T. Guthrie
James T Guthrie is the author of Bullseye Bella, winner of the 2018 Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon award and short-listed for the Best First Book Award at the 2019 New Zealand Children and Young Adult Book Awards.
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The blog of his online alter-ego - Natalie Biz: International Librarian of Mystery - won the 2004 NZ Netguide Best Blog Award, was nominated for an international Bloggies Award, and made an honoree at the 2005 Webby Awards. -
Kathryn Apel
Kathryn Apel is an Aussie children's author who writes too much. She paints pictures with words, because much as she'd love to, Kat can't draw. Kat's goal is to find the perfect word for every situation. Sometimes that's a lot harder than you think!
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Kat's Books;
VERSE NOVELS:
What Snail Know
Too Many Friends
Bully on the Bus
On Track
PICTURE BOOKS:
Mad Cows
Miss Understood
The Bird in the Herd
Up and Down on a Rainy Day
This is the Mud!
CHAPTER BOOK:
Fencing with Fear